December 23, 2006, 9:18 AM CT

Hypertension Start At Young Age

At what age does high blood pressure starts showing up. I was thinking may be when you are age 50 or more, or may be when you are at age 40 or more. I was surprised to read this study. Who would think that high blood pressure starts at age 10.

By age 10, some African American children already have high nighttime blood pressure as per latest research findings.

As they grow up, black children also show greater increases in nighttime blood pressure, according to a study that followed children's blood pressures over 15 years.

Blacks experience less of a dip in nighttime blood pressure than whites. The gap between the pressure measurements of whites and blacks also widens as children get older.

At night, blood pressure should drop because the body is resting, says Dr. Gregory Harshfield, director of MCG's Georgia Prevention Institute and a co-author on the study published in the Dec. 19 edition of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association.

One reason for the higher nighttime pressure is some blacks retain more sodium, which increases fluid volume in their bodies and their blood pressure, according to researchers.

To determine pressure differences between black and white children and at what age those differences occur, Dr. Frank Treiber, vice president for research and study co-author measured the ambulatory blood pressures of almost 700 children 12 times during 15 years.........

Posted by: April      Read more         Source

December 20, 2006, 7:07 PM CT

Treatment for Restless Legs

A TV commercial lauded the power of Requip (ropinirole), the first drug approved to treat restless leg syndrome, a condition whose signature feature is creepy-crawly leg sensations that interfere with sleep and rest in nearly 1 of every 10 adults.

But if taken too long, the drug can actually backfire, causing symptoms to worsen, say doctors who specialize in treating the condition. They say that therapy that rotates through different types of medications may be needed for a number of patients.

"It's impossible to tell the whole story in a TV spot just a few seconds long," said Irene Richard, M.D, a movement disorder neurologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center. "When patients come in asking about the therapy, doctors need to know that this is commonly not a simple, single-pill solution, despite what they've seen on TV".

In an article reported in the recent issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Richard and fellow neurologist Roger Kurlan, M.D., warn primary care physicians that they cannot expect long-term success by simply prescribing ropinirole or a similar medicine in its class, which works by activating dopamine receptors in the brain. Instead, the team - experts at treating movement disorders like Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome and restless leg syndrome - recommends that physicians may need to rotate some patients through these drugs along with different types of medications.........

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December 20, 2006, 4:38 AM CT

Are Drug-eluting Stents Worth The Cost?

Over the past 3 decades, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI, or balloon angioplasty) has significantly changed the treatment of coronary artery disease (narrowing of the arteries supplying the heart muscle). Unlike the more invasive coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, angioplasty is a nonsurgical procedure in which a tiny catheter with a balloon is inserted into the coronary artery. The balloon is then inflated to push aside the plaque causing the narrowing. Often a stent (wire mesh tube) is left in place to help keep the treated artery open; however, restenosis, or repeat narrowing, of the artery can occur over time. Drug-eluting stents were recently introduced to lower this risk of restenosis and have become an attractive alternative to bare-metal stents. However, they are much more expensive than bare-metal stents, and studies have shown no significant differences in rates of death or heart attack between patient groups receiving either type of stent.

Two articles that will appear in the Jan. 16, 2007, issue of CMAJ provide new insights into the use of drug-eluting stents.

The first is a research article by Grilli and colleagues in which they compare the use of drug-eluting stents for PCI in public versus private sectors of the Italian medical community. They also evaluate the effect PCI with drug-eluting stents has had on the volume of cardiac surgery, including traditional CABG surgery. They found that drug-eluting stents were used more frequently in private hospitals, with public hospitals using them more sparingly and selectively in patients with high-risk coronary artery disease. Overall cardiac surgery volumes decreased significantly in the public hospitals but remained stable in the private hospitals. The authors note that future assessments of the impact of drug-eluting stents need to consider the influence of system-wide financial and organizational incentives for adoption of their use.........

Posted by: Emily      Permalink         Source

December 20, 2006, 4:10 AM CT

Many Ulcerative Colitis Patients Are Not Compliant

A large survey supported by the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA) shows that 65 percent of ulcerative colitis (UC) patients are less than fully compliant with first-line therapies to treat their disease. The findings are significant because an earlier study observed that patients less than fully compliant experience five times the number of disease flare-ups.

Respondents to the CCFA survey were taking a variety of aminosalicylates, medications which help relieve symptoms and inflammation for a number of UC sufferers, but which require multiple pills be taken two to four times a day. CCFA conducted the survey to gain a better understanding of patients' experiences with UC and these medications.

The most usually reported reasons for non-compliance with medications were the dosing frequency, the number of pills and the inconvenience linked to the medication. Seventy-four percent of the 1,595 UC sufferers included in the survey experienced at least one flare-up of UC during the prior year. Flare-ups can involve heightened symptoms such as diarrhea, abdominal pain, loss of appetite, fatigue as well as complications such as anemia.

"The study shows that a number of patients struggle to comply with their current medicine regimen because they have to take multiple pills throughout the day," said the survey report's author Edward V. Loftus, Jr., a gastroenterologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. "And we know that when UC patients don't take their medications as prescribed, it can have a significant impact on their health and quality of life".........

Posted by: Emily      Permalink         Source

December 15, 2006, 5:14 AM CT

Learning During Sleep?

The question of how the brain stores or discards memories still remains largely unexplained. Many brain researchers regard the consolidation theory as the best approach so far. This states that fresh impressions are first stored as short-term memories in the hippocampus. They are then said to move within hours or a few days - usually during deep sleep - into the cerebral cortex where they enter long-term memory. Investigations by Thomas Hahn, Mayank Mehta and the Nobel Prize winner Bert Sakmann from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have now shed new light on the mechanisms that create memory. According to their findings, the areas of the brain work together, but possibly in a different way from that previously assumed. "This is a technically sophisticated study which could have considerable influence on our understanding of how nerve cells interact during sleep consolidation," confirmed Edvard Moser, Director of the Centre for the Biology of Memory in Trondheim, Norway.

It has been difficult up to now to use experiments to examine the brain processes that create memory. The scientists in Heidelberg developed an innovative experimental approach especially for this purpose. They succeeded in measuring the membrane potential of individual interneurones (neurones that suppress the activity of the hippocampus) in anaethetised mice. At the same time, they recorded the field potential of thousands of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex. This allowed them to link the behaviour of the individual nerve cells with that of the cerebral cortex. The researchers discovered that the interneurones they examined are active at almost the same time as the field potential of the cerebral cortex. There was just a slight delay, like an echo.........

Posted by: Emily      Permalink         Source

December 13, 2006, 8:06 PM CT

Elimination Of Menstrual Cycles Safe

Researchers for the first time have demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of continuous-use oral contraceptives that can eliminate menstrual cycles, according to a study published in the recent issue of Contraception.

While low-dose oral contraceptives reducing the number of menstrual periods to four are on the market, this study marks the first time researchers have shown that it's safe to eliminate them, said lead investigator David F. Archer, M.D., professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern Virginia Medical School.

"It is felt that the relief of menstrual cycle symptoms during continuous use of the contraceptive is a significant improvement in the quality of life," said Archer.

Traditional birth-control regimens include 21 days of active hormones with seven days of placebos to continue monthly menstruation. During menstruation, many women suffer a variety of symptoms including headaches, bloating and irritability, Archer said.

In the study, conducted at 92 sites in North America, researchers used a birth-control pill consisting of 20 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol and 90 micrograms of levonorgestrel, a formulation being developed by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals under the name Lybrel. Healthy, sexually active women between 18 and 49 years old were given a continuous regimen without any breaks or placebos.........

Posted by: Emily      Permalink         Source

December 13, 2006, 4:58 AM CT

Positive Reults For Investigational Thrombocytopenia Agent

AKR-501 is a promising member of a new class of agents called, "TPO receptor agonists" that is now in Phase II clinical development. It is an investigational orally administered drug being developed by AkaRx, Inc. intended to mimic the biologic effect of thrombopoietin, a growth factor that stimulates production of platelets.

At the American Society of Hematology meeting, results from two Phase I clinical research trials were presented. These data in healthy volunteers showed that AKR-501 produced a 50% increase or greater over the baseline platelet count. AKR-501 is the first oral drug in its class to show these platelet increases with a single dose. In the single dose study this was achieved at the 100 mg dose. In all volunteers given multiple doses of either 10 mg or 20 mg for 10 - 14 days a platelet effect was observed where increases were at least 50% over baseline.

The unmet medical need for AKR-501 is that there is no approved agent to specifically stimulate megakaryocytes to produce platelets to treat thrombocytopenia in the same way that there are products available to stimulate production of red and white blood cells. Severe thrombocytopenia is currently managed in some settings with platelet transfusions. However, this temporary solution in not suitable for long-term use in chronic settings and is often associated with serious complications when used in acute situations. AKR-501 imitates the body's mechanism for stimulating platelet production by mimicking the action of thrombopoietin-the growth factor that modulates this process.........

Drugs causing thrombocytopenia

Posted by: Emily      Permalink         Source

December 11, 2006, 9:19 PM CT

Cutting Back On Cigarettes May Not Work

Heavy smokers who have reduced their number of daily cigarettes still experience significantly greater exposure to toxins per cigarette than light smokers, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Minnesota.

Even when smokers in the two groups smoked as few as five cigarettes a day, heavy smokers who reduced their cigarette intake experienced two to three times the amount of total toxin exposure per cigarette when compared with light smokers, researchers report in the recent issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

In addition, researchers observed that the more that heavy smokers reduced their smoking, the more likely they were to increase their exposure to toxicants per cigarette presumably because they took more frequent puffs or inhaled deeper or longer on each cigarette, a process referred to as "compensatory smoking." As a result, smokers who decreased their smoking to as little as one to three cigarettes per day experienced a four- to eight-fold increased exposure to toxins per cigarette as compared with light smokers.

Compensatory smoking occurs because smokers are trying to maintain a specific level of nicotine in their bodies, says Dorothy K. Hatsukami, Ph.D., lead author of the study and director of the University's Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center in Minneapolis. Other factors, such as the sensory aspects of smoking, also may play a role in compensatory smoking, Hatsukami says.........

Posted by: Emily      Permalink         Source

December 8, 2006, 4:56 AM CT

Drug Trials May Become Obsolete

Immunologists studying what went wrong in the fateful Northwick Park drug trial in London in March 2006 have developed a test that they say may have spotted the near-deadly effects of the 'superantibody' drug TGN1412.

The announcement came at the unveiling of a report by the expert scientific group convened to provide guidelines to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which governs UK clinical trials. The group has provided a list of 22 recommendations to minimize the risk from phase-one clinical trials, during which a new drug is tested on humans for the first time.

Six volunteers became critically ill during the phase-one test of TGN1412, developed by now-defunct drug firm TeGenero. Eventhough preclinical research on monkeys had shown no sign of danger, the drug provoked devastating immune reactions in the human subjects.

Immunologist Stephen Inglis a researcher at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control in London and a member of the expert group, has now developed a lab test using human immune cells that shows the same overactivation and proliferation seen in the volunteers. Eventhough still being refined and developed, he hopes that similar tests could become a routine part of preclinical testing of new drugs that target the immune system.........

Posted by: Emily      Permalink         Source

December 7, 2006, 9:43 PM CT

children with Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder

Many children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder suffer through a range of problems, from poor grades to poor relations with parents and teachers. But more than half of these children also have serious problems making friends. Too often they live lonely lives, never learning to develop the social skills they need to make friends as children or as adults.

"Children with ADHD often are peer-rejected, and their difficulties multiply as they grow to adulthood," said Amori Yee Mikami, assistant professor of psychology and principal investigator for a new clinical study designed to help children with ADHD become better at making friends.

"Children with ADHD often grow up with depression and relationship problems, some may develop criminal behavior and substance abuse problems," Mikami said. "There can be a spiral of failure that is partly the result of not having learned to make and keep friends as children".

About 5 percent of school-age children are affected by ADHD. Symptoms include a short attention span, poor organization, excessive talking, disruptive and aggressive behavior, restlessness and irritability. Children with ADHD often are uncooperative and may make their own rules.

"These symptoms get in the way of making and keeping friends," Mikami said. "The child with ADHD can become stigmatized, known as 'the bad kid,' and this can lead to more inappropriate behavior. It can become a vicious cycle resulting in more social isolation".........

Posted by: Emily      Permalink         Source